Dissolution and Legacy of Group f64
In the wake of the division between the activist and the aesthetic ends of straight photography, and in the face of increasingly dire economic conditions for Bay Area art galleries, Group f/64 came to a quiet end in 1936. Its legacy endures; by its collective activity Group f/64 lent prominence to the concept of straight photography and helped define just what constitutes ''purity'' in photographic practice. Through debate and visual counterpoint with Mortensen and Pictorialism, f/64 staked out new territory for photographic art. These clear, sharp images were among those that ushered in new standards for art photography in the post-Stieglitz era. Although there was minimal social mission inherent in Group f/64's practice, its commitment to unadorned reality validated and opened the door to artistic acceptance for the work of FSA photographers, and documentarians before and after. Michael Oren situates the group's legacy in terms that ring of spiritual purity and humility.
Group f/64 may be seen as part of an essentialist movement whose traditionally American preoccupation with the hard edges of material details reaches back to the Transcendentalists, who saw in such details evidence of God's immanence. Anecdotal qualities, whether of Mortensen's or Lange's type, would have vitiated such pretensions (Oren 1991, 123).
The 1932 de Young exhibition was revisited in major exhibitions in 1963, 1978, and 1992. Group f.64 member Henry Swift facilitated the first, at the San Francisco Museum of Art (later the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). During his lifetime Swift used his income as a stockbroker to purchase prints from the other members; his widow added to the collection and donated it to the Museum of Art in 1962. Using the original checklist and the Swift collection as guides, the curators of the later shows (Jean S. Tucker at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Therese Thau Heyman at The Oakland Museum, respectively) recreated the 1932 exhibition as accurately as possible, given the limitations of a checklist that sometimes offered only a general description of a print's subject, rather than a standard, accepted title. These periodic reassessments underscore Group f/64's importance as a primer and a touchstone for straight photography.
While some of the technical particularities of f/64's straight approach have been subsumed into camera club quality critique factors (e.g., sharp and proper focus, good highlights and shadow detail, strong, dramatic pictures that create immediate interest, sometimes using one strong element of interest), and the Group's concentration on natural forms may have evolved into the work of countless nature photographers wielding macro-focus lenses fitted out with ring lights for full revelation of, as Edward Weston put it, ''the thing itself,'' the intrinsic fascination with photographic beauty that characterized Group f/64 has continued to inspire photographers to come to grips with whatever photography's tools have to offer in terms of unique visual, aesthetic qualities.
George Slade
See also: Abbott, Berenice; Adams, Ansel; Atget, Eugene; Blossfeldt, Karl; Cunningham, Imogen; Farm Security Administration; History of Photography: Interwar Years; History of Photography: Twentieth Century Pioneers; Man Ray; Modernism; Modotti, Tina; Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo; Outerbridge, Jr., Paul; Photo-Secession; Renger-Patzsch, Albert; Sander, August; Steichen, Edward; Sheeler, Charles; Stieglitz, Alfred; Strand, Paul; Ulmann, Doris; Weston, Edward
Further Reading
Colson, James B. ''Stieglitz, Strand, and Straight Photography.'' In Oliphant, Dave, and Thomas Zigal, eds., Perspectives on Photography: Essays on the Work ofDu Camp, Dancer, Robinson, Stieglitz, Strand, and Smithers at the Humanities Research Center, Austin, TX: Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, 1982. Dater, Judy. Imogen Cunningham: A Portrait. Boston: New
York Graphic Society, 1979. Hambourg, Maria Morris, and Christopher Phillips. The New Vision: Photography Between the Wars. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989. Heyman, Therese Thau, ed. Seeing Straight: Thef/64 Revolution in Photography. Oakland, CA: The Oakland Museum, 1992. Heyman, Therese Thau. ''A Rock or a Line of Unemployed: Art and Document In Dorothea Lange's Photographs.'' In Heyman, Sandra S. Phillips, and John Szarkowski,
Dorothea Lange: American Photographs. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1994.
Mann, Margery. ''The Henry F. Swift Collection of Photographs by the f/64 Group, San Francisco Museum of Art.'' Artforum 2, no. 5 (November 1963) 53.
Newhall, Nancy. Ansel Adams: The Eloquent Light. San Francisco: The Sierra Club, 1963; revised second edition, Millerton, New York: Aperture, 1980.
Oren, Michael. ''On the 'Impurity' of Group f/64 Photography." History of Photography 15, no. 2 (Summer 1991) 119-127.
Rosenblum, Naomi. In Heyman, Therese Thau, ed., Seeing Straight: The f/64 Revolution in Photography, Oakland, CA: The Oakland Museum, 1992, p. 34.
Tsujimoto, Karen. Images of America: Precisionist Painting and Modern Photography. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1982.
Tucker, Jean S. Group f/64. St. Louis: The University of Missouri-St. Louis, 1978.
White, Minor, ed. Aperture 11, no. 4 (1964) [Imogen Cunningham issue].
Edward Weston, Cabbage Leaf, California, USA, 1931, Gelatin silver print, 7 =6 x 9 /V. [Gift of T.J. Maloney. © 1981 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York]
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